Between Official and Private Dispute: The Case of Christian Spain and Provence in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

Literary and historical evidence of religious disputes that took place between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages exists in a variety of sources. Hebrew manuscripts and Latin documents concerning such encounters survive from the disputations that were held in Paris (1240), Barcelona (1263), and Tortosa (1413–1414). Some of these were written by participants themselves after the events described. Some were produced by Christian authors as protocols, either during or after the disputations. Significant discrepancies concerning the same dispute are to be found between the Christian and Jewish accounts.See Y. Baer, “Towards a Critique of the Disputes Between Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris and Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz, 2 (1931), pp. 172-187; Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), II, pp. 176-181; Ḥ. Merḥavia, The Talmud in the Eyes of Christianity: the View of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature in the Medieval Christian World, 500–1248 (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1970), pp. 227–348; R. Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 1–80; J. Riera I Sans, La Cronica en Hebreu de la Disputa de Tortosa (Barcelona: Fundacio Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1974). Other material on this subject exists in the literature of the Christian Adversus Iudaeos (dating from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages) and in the Jewish polemical literature (dating from the twelfth century). Pioneer studies have also recently appeared using the records of the Spanish Inquisition, in which much evidence was found concerning such disputes.See E. Gutwirth, “Gender, History and the Judeo-Christian Polemic,” in O. Limor and G. G. Stroumsa, eds., Contra Judaeos (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996), pp. 257–278.